Getting Back to Your Habits and Goals
This year I decided to share my ideas through this blog in order to face my fear of failure. The goal was to publish 52 articles this year (1 article per week). Besides facing my fear of failure, it’s also a great way practice writing and improve my thinking (More info here).
One article per week might sound like a lot, but I had an bulletproof strategy. Instead of working towards a goal, I was going to write every day and the publishing would take care of itself. The idea was to use systems instead of goals. The compromise was 20 minutes of writing every day, which would enable me to produce 52 articles in a year.
I didn’t follow the approach I mentioned above 😅. The first half of this year I had enough free time to work in my writing for a couple of hours twice a week. This approach worked for the first 5 months of 2017. However, new projects and interests came up, and now I’m struggling to make time to write. I used to write when I felt like it, but it’s getting harder to create the space for writing.
We are now in the 30th week of the year, and I have published 16 articles so far. This means that if I want to achieve my goal I have to double my current output.
When you miss more than twice
One of the core principles of creating a habit is: “never miss twice in a row”. But what happens when you have missed so many times that you feel that everything is lost? Should we give up our goals? our dreams? the person we want to become?
I’m writing this article because I’m not giving up after a slump. Never miss twice is a great rule for habit development, but there will be times in which we miss more than twice, and it’s okay.

Learning from our mistakes
Habits need consistency
Mistake #1 was not following the habit approach. By not following the plan, I put myself in a difficult situation. A situation in which I needed a lot of will power and discipline in order to reach my goal. I ignored all the research, and hoped that the writing would come naturally — it didn’t happen. It would have been easier if I had done some work everyday.
Actions and Goals alignment
As I wrote in What I Learned in 2016: if our actions are not aligned with our goals, we will never achieve them. I have spent around 6 hours per week playing basketball during the last months, versus 30–45 minutes of writing. It is obvious that writing has not been a real priority. It doesn’t matter how much I say that my goal is to write 52 articles this year if I spend more time doing other stuff.
Start Small
The initial goal of writing 20 minutes each day was too optimistic. I aimed high in order to push myself. I thought that if I aimed for 20 minutes I would do at least 10 or 5 minutes of writing. This didn’t work at all. Whenever I was supposed to write, I didn’t get started. I was to tired or didn’t have the time to do it. It’s better to start small. A better approach would have been to start writing 1 paragraph per day, until I felt I could do more.
First things first
As the day goes by, chances are that you will not do what you are supposed to do. Lately I’ve been waking up late, and have sacrificed writing. Every time I miss my morning writing I tell myself that I will do it after work. It almost never happened.
I started writing this article right after waking up, after several days of “I will write later during the day”. The best way to make sure that we get done what’s important for us, is to do it first thing in the morning.
Remember Why
In my case I’m not writing to become a writer. I’m writing to face my fear of creating something and showing it to the world. In other words, fear of failure.
I often forget why I’m doing this. I spend too much time trying to come up with a great article, instead of writing something good enough and learning from the feedback . Expecting perfection or greatness is a big obstacle if you want to start something new. Aiming for perfection prevents us from getting started. Don’t wait until you are ready, stop doing research and get started! The best research is doing something and learning from the experience. You will never be ready, just do it !!
Getting back on track
Anything worth pursuing is difficult. Every year we set personal goals because we want to become better human beings, we want to live better lives, we want to live in a better world. Whenever we start pursuing the improvement of our conditions, we will face hardships. Learning something new, developing a new habit, quitting a bad habit; all of them take time, patience and hard work. It’s okay to fall, it isn’t okay to stay on the ground. Every failure is a lesson. Think about what went wrong and improve your approach for the next time. Everyday we get a new chance to get it right, it doesn’t matter how many times we have fallen.
